There are single words that create issues to get the spelling correct more often than others. They are words that may sound like another but have multiple spellings depending on the meaning. Or, usually, they are words that aren’t spelled as they sound.

In the case of words that sound the same and have multiple spellings, most spell checkers aren’t able to know what your trying to say so they may not catch the difference. The bigger named spell checkers do more than check the letters, they also make suggestions that you chose the wrong ‘their, they’re, there’.

Some people remember things with images better than just a list of words and rules. Here is a couple fun infographics we found about Misspelled and Misused Words.

A shorter list but with a lot of fun with it’s graphics is 8 Commonly Misused Words . This infographic outlines 8 words that have multiple spellings and with each are a different meaning. They are very easily switched and thus saying something different than you meant to say.

Looking around the internet for a map of Australia, I happened upon a series of “typography” country maps by Bold & Noble.

What makes them special (fun… cool…) is that the variety of countries the have are made up of city and state words to make up the shape of the country. Words vary in size depending on state vs city and then key cities. Of course there are no mountains, roads or country created state lines you may see on convention maps.

I heard in a store today a couple trying to name all the movies with a certain number of words in the title. They were going for multiples but here we are looking for just one word. It took us a bit to remember all of these. With the list going long enough we had to write them down as they came to us.

It is interesting how many single word movie names tell you what the movie is about and how many are just a word until you see the movie and how it relates. Have fun with these:

The Internet has enabled us to reach out further than we have been able to do so in the past. Now, we are able to get news from someone on the front line via a cell phone and a connection to a social site. Via those same social sites and the many blogs, we can see trends of the masses and thoughts of the individual. As well, instead of a quick conversation in passing and not know why a friend made a reference they did, we are now able to see how thoughts are formed and the influences simple words have on the outcome of our journeys.

Chris Harrison has taken information available from many sources, not the least all the data Google collects and has build a series of graphics showing the path in single words between two opposite words. I would encourage you to take the time to visit the site to understand the full scope of the collection and analyzing of the words. To give you a quick idea that the reporting of the data was no easy task:

“To better achieve a even distribution, I normalized the frequencies of bigrams based on total primary term frequency. So, for example, in the case of war vs. peace, there are 81,839,381 bigrams starting with war and 31,263,375 bigrams starting with peace. If I render the spectrum without normalization, it ends up lopsided toward war (since the usage totals are so much higher). To compensate, I scale down all of war’s bigrams so that the overall frequencies are even.“

The original project was called Word Spectrum, here is a low resolution example of one of the many graphics available. Each graphic on Chris’s site are done as a high def PDF so you can download and examine at your leisure.

As the process continues, Chris rethought the layout of the words and the path of single words leading from one end of a though to the opposite. These are called Word Associations. Again, available to view online or download as PDFs.

To keep my day going on track, I track work and progress in as simple form as possible. There are many tools available to link work together with other work so people can see how efforts effect other parts of a project. ToDo lists work great.

Before we get to a check list of what the day holds, and even before anyone works on a project plan – we map out what we are trying to get done and the many parts of what will make our finished deliverable a success.

A great tool to do this is MindMaps. For anyone who is not familiar with MindMaps, think of it as a core deliverable with all of the parts that make it possible spidering out from the center. There are thousands of books on the subject and many software titles available to help. A whiteboard is all you really need to set one up with a group, but software is nice if you need to share or change later.

If you look around on the Internet for MindMapping posts, you will find that people can really get into the process. They put descriptions on each of the spider legs and all kinds of fun drawings. For us, here, let’s keep it very simple and explore what you can say with just one word.

Mind Maps are more compact than conventional notes, often taking up one side of paper. This helps you to make associations easily. And if you find out more information after you have drawn the main Mind Map, then you can easily add it in.

Mind Maps are also useful for:

* Summarizing information.
* Consolidating information from different research sources.
* Thinking through complex problems.
* Presenting information in a format that shows the overall structure of your subject.

A couple of the better known MindMapping software solutions are: www.thinkbuzan.com and www.mindjet.com/ – they both offer all kinds of videos and instructions.

Information Tamers has a very nice article taking your through the process of simple to very detailed. Not being wrapped around a particular software, the post is about the how and why for using MindMaps.

Since, so many great ideas start when your not at your desktop or in front of a whiteboard, there are a couple nice apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. There are actually about a dozen apps, but these two are ones I actually use because they make it easy to share via a free box.net account (you can also upload to your desktop via your wireless network or email). The outputs can be an image or PDF if you just want to show someone your ideas, or they can be imported into your desktop MindMapping app.

The smaller screens force me to keep the lines to one word. Let’s see if I can stick to that when using the apps on a iPad when it comes out.

There are many ‘word of the day’ sites and services available to us on the Web. Some try to teach us big words, others are ‘interesting’ words and there are also ones that try to teach us a new language.

One site I hit all the time for fun is Learn Something Everyday. In an attempt to keep their fun facts short, they wrap it with a touch of a hand drawing that drives the point home. It is a good example of keeping things simple and one groups attempt to say more with fewer words. Not often a single word, but they get it down to a very few.